In its pursuit for providing online content that is authentic and searchable by all Google the search giant will be digitising atleast 8,00,000 books that are lying at the Mysore University in India. These books include India’s first political treatise the ’Arthasastra’ written in the 4th century BC by Kautilya and many such other priceless collections.

"Written in both papers and palm leaves, there are around 100,000 manuscripts in our library, some dating back to the eighth century. The effort is to restore and preserve this cultural heritage for effective dissemination of knowledge," said J. Shashidhara Prasad, vice chancellor of the university.

"Many manuscripts on ayurveda, mathematics, medicine, science, astrology and economy including ‘Arthasastra’ and several paper manuscripts of the Wodeyar dynasty of Mysore will be digitised first," Prasad, who was recently in Delhi, said.

Google has offered to digitise the books free of cost and the books which are exclusive would be patented before being digitised and being available on public domain. 

This isn’t the first time that google is digitising books infact The Google Books Library Project digitises books from major libraries around the world and makes their collections searchable on Google Book Search by using a technique Optical Character Recognition, or the OCR.

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